Nvidia Seeks AI Workload Forecasts with $12.9 Billion Hugging Face Bid
Nvidia may have agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion in a deal that is yet to be confirmed.
Hugging Face generates annualised revenue of around $150 million, which would make the acquisition price about 86 times sales if treated as an ordinary software company.
However, the purchase price makes more sense when considering what Hugging Face actually provides: a doorway through which much of the open-AI world enters.
Hugging Face is often described as a repository for open models, but it's closer to a mixture of GitHub, an app store, and a package-management system for artificial intelligence.
The platform has 13 million users, over 2 million public models, and more than 500,000 public datasets by the end of 2025, with its collection approaching 3 million models by August 2026.
Nvidia's acquisition would give it control of Hugging Face, which is used by companies including those in the Fortune 500 list to decide which AI model to fine-tune, quantise or deploy.
This decision can determine spending on GPUs, CPUs, accelerators, and other hardware, making Hugging Face a key component in the entire computing stack for AI workloads.